Accountability ranked

Daniel Kaufmann from the Institute is attending the conference and says the most resource dependent regions, the Middle East and North Africa, are the least transparent.

Of the 58 countries tracked, Myanmar was the most secretive about its income from resources.

Mr Kaufmann says it is an enormous challenge to track mining revenue.

"There is a lack of transparency and accountability in most countries that are rich in natural resources," he told the ABC.

However, he says the situation is improving.

"The silver lining is that there is a set of 11 countries out of the 58 we studied that are doing relatively well," he said.

Mr Kaufmann says East Timor and Indonesia were the most transparent countries in East Asia and the Pacific.

Australia was number four overall in the study, behind Norway.

Mr Kaufman says Australia has not signed up for the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative which is also holding its global conference in Sydney this week.

"Dozens of countries have already joined, including rich industrialised countries," he said.

EITI requires governments to declare the royalties and taxes they receive from mining companies and their receipts for the payments.

Room for improvement

Mr Kaufman says Australia has room for improvement in other areas as well.

"Also they have to embark in terms of the reforms mandating companies to disclose their revenues paid to governments as a requirement for being listed on the stock exchange, just like it has just happened in the United States and now agreed by the European Union," he said.

The UK Government, as the chair of the Group of Eight industrialised nations, is pushing for more transparency in the resources industry at next month's G8 summit

A professor of economics and public policy at the University of Oxford, Paul Collier, says openness is difficult to achieve.

He says there needs to be a crack down on corporate tax evasion, which leaves "a huge hole in African government finances", and the closure of loopholes in ownership laws which enable money laundering.

"The G8 will make a start but the problems are the result of many years work by some of the cleverest minds on earth," he told the conference.

Ume Wainetti is a women rights campaigner from Papua New Guinea who is directly involved with the Ok Tedi mine.

She says the needs of communities, to preserve the environment for example, are often ignored when mining companies move in.

"All we know is what is around us," she said.

"We survive on the environment that we have," she told the conference.